The Paradise Players
The Paradise Players is a seven-member touring company, led by the South's premier playwright, Mr Tennessee Williams with the aim of bringing his lesser known works to as wide an audience as is humanly possible.
Their current tour, which commences in the north of England in early Autumn 2016, comprises six linked vignettes showing the virtuosity and breadth of this celebrated playwright's canon.
Long-standing MADS Members, please note that The Paradise Players is a device to create an ensemble of MADS actors who will present Six by Tenn at MADS Theatre.
The Fat Man's Wife
The Fat Man's Wife was written by Williams in 1938 but remained unproduced until November 11, 2004, when it opened at the New York City Center in a collection of rarely seen Williams one-acts titled Five by Tenn.[6] The play tells the story of Vera Cartwright, a sophisticated Manhattan society lady who is forced to choose between her boorish husband, a theatrical producer, and a young playwright who has become her admirer. The Fat Man's Wife received the sharpest criticism of any of the five exhumed plays; in The New Yorker, John Lahr called it a "heterosexual fantasy awash with false emotion and bad writing," and noted that "Williams is obviously attempting to write in a style entirely alien to him, trying on a faux-urbane manner that fits him like a rented tuxedo in the wrong size."
At Liberty
At Liberty was written in 1941 and tells the story of a once-successful actress who retreats to her childhood home in Mississippi, with fantasies of resuscitating her career.
The Dark Room
The Dark Room was written in c. 1939, and published in 1958.
The Case of the Crushed Petunias
The Case of the Crushed Petunias was written in 1941 and is the story of Dorothy Simple, a woman trapped in her job at a prim and proper shop in Massachusetts. Her complacent existence is interrupted by a visit from a tall man who works for LIFE Inc. who, she discovers, trampled her petunias the night before. With offers of poetry and packets of seeds, he helps her break free from her dreary life.
in our profession
Annabelle, a travelling actress, declares the life of her profession to be "loud, crazy, glaring, senseless and stupid" yet claims that should not prevent her from "being completely sincere." Tonight, Annabelle is in St. Louis, asking her most recent beau, Richard, to marry her, and Richard employs all defenses – putting on records, taking trips to the kitchen, and even calling a neighbor to come down from upstairs – to change the subject. Yet when Richard's neighbor Paul comes to the supposed rescue, Annabelle's passion proves as flexible and entrancing as her artistic craft.
Me, Vashya
Sir Vashya Shontine, the leader of a massive munitions manufacturing corporation, whose secret operations have controlled the affairs of a world war for the last six years, has a problem. His wife, Lady Shontine, princess of a foreign land all but obliterated by the war, has begun having terrifying visions where soldiers, lost as a result of her husband's deadly business appear to her, each with a terrifying request.